Japans Teenagers
November 12, 2008

RADIO 2CBA FOCAL POINT COMMENTARY. BROADCAST 7th April 2000

Keizo Obuchi, the Prime Minister of Japan since July 1998, suffered a stroke last Sunday. The country now has a new Prime Minister. Mr Obuchi was a victim of the Japanese disease: over work. But it is possible that today’s teenagers may not suffer from the same disease.

The UNESCO Courier, the international magazine of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, had a recent article by the Japanese writer and film maker Ryu Murakami about the current generation of Japan’s teenagers. These young people seem unlikely to die from overwork.

Japan is an unusual country in this multicultural world: it has a single religion and a single culture, and for the last one and half centuries it has had a single national aim: modernization. For much of its existence, Japan shut itself from the rest of the world.

Emperor Meiji (from 1852 to 1912) transformed the country. Japan decided to become modernized. It shopped around the world to get the best expertise. For example, the British had the best navy and so they were invited to train the Japanese navy; the Germans had the best army and so they were invited to train the army.

From a country which had isolated itself from the world, Japan was eager to embrace the best organizations and techniques then on offer around the world. Even after the appalling World War II, Japan remained committed to modernization and so within four decades Japan was the world’s second most important economic power.

But now we come to the warning in the UNESCO Courier. Ryu Murakami, himself the father of a 19 year old, is worried about the attitudes of today’s teenagers. The national goal of modernization has been achieved. The country has done what it set out to do a century and a half ago. Where does it go now?

Mr Murakami warns about the aimlessness of the teenagers. They are not so keen on work. He says that they delude themselves with video games, music, fashion, Hollywood, sex, drugs or cults. He goes on: “If we leave them as they are, they will eventually seek revenge against a society which did not give them clear advice when it was needed. Unemployment among Japanese youth has gone over the 10 per cent mark, but no adults here, politicians included, seem to be worried”.

This ought to a major challenge for Japan’s new Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.